Here's an overview of what we've been up to in November
Hi friends, welcome to Chillsy's 12th monthly update!
Chillsy exists because we are frustrated at the lack of practical opportunities to make meaningful connections, and subsequent missed events and activities.
In these updates, we'll share what we've been up to, and our progress towards our goal of helping people overcome various barriers including time, opportunities, confidence to do things they enjoy and feeling less lonely.
Our Focus in November - User & First Principles
This month we primarily focussed on assessing and reviewing our progress with the app and its effectiveness for actually helping people make friends. We’ve spent some time developing our clarity and position around belonging, friendship, & loneliness to start with. Doing a bunch of primary research our conclusions were as follows:
We are specifically addressing situational loneliness - Loneliness caused through some kind of transition (moving country, changing jobs, graduating etc.)
We are doing this by creating belonging through friendship - Belonging is a core human need addressed by family, community/church, and romantic relationships.
We’ve chosen to address friendship, because it also holds the greatest opportunity for growth, and presents the greatest opportunity for our segment:
One person may have many friends
People in their mid-20s people who move city, aren’t in relationships, and aren’t part of a community need friends!
To achieve friendship there are 3 qualities that must be met:
Reciprocity
Similarity
Familiarity
Similarly, there must be a context that is suitable to friend making (work, uni class, gym etc.)
We need to optimise for these, to make friendship more achievable. We currently create contexts with high similarity and allow for reciprocity through invites. But there is incredible room for better solutions/improvement.
We took our learnings to the app, looked at our matching system and decided to try something new.
Intentioned 1-1 matching
Now, users can see 5 high-quality matches every week and send them a message requesting to hang out. We aimed to design this feature in a way that allows for clearly defined reciprocity, a low-cost outreach, and speed to meeting in person. Early signals show this is working - however, only time will tell!
As we continue to research and experiment our expertise and clarity of thinking are significantly improving. We have a better understanding of the constraints, and can develop stronger hypotheses on what will/will not work.
Good, Bad and Ugly
Good
Addressed internal issues that we’d been keeping as a low priority and slowly snowballed: Webcam, monitor, WFH setup.
Our first paid user on the app (paying users get extra features like bonus matches and the power to message any other user)
We’ve planned to launch our Gals Brunches in Melbourne starting next year - and sold our first ticket already
More clarity and stronger opinions around what we want to address/why
Bad
We’ve had to take a few steps back and look at the bigger picture. This meant slowing down, but also, better foundations going forward
Ugly
We maxed out our usage for Glide after launching our 1-1 matching feature, which forced us to turn off a lot of features we’d worked hard to launch otherwise we’d be out of pocket. It was very scary for us at the time, but we’ve fixed it now!
Our Focus For Next Month
Planning and executing experiments to help people directly make friends. This means going through the life cycle more intentionally and implementing our learnings 🧪
Addressing finances - we need to make enough money to survive LOL! 💀
Preparing to wind down for the holidays. We are both going overseas and need to plan 🇵🇭🇮🇳
Kudos
AUT for the free office space ;)
Asks
Remember… “One step forward, two steps back is still 3 steps.”